I'm Contributors Editor at TheStreet.com, a business news, market data and stock analysis website. I was Editorial Director of Digital Book World, a website dedicated to covering the world of e-books and digital publishing. I've been a reader since 1986, a journalist since 2005 and an e-reader since 2011. I live and work in New York City.

Trying To Chillax About My Bromance With Scrabble And 5,000 Other New Words

If I told you that I was going to “chillax with a mojito poolside while I played a few rounds of Sudoku and listened to the latest mixtape from my frenemyLime,” you’d probably know what I was about to do…more or less. But every key word in that sentence wouldn’t be a permissible play in one of my all-time favorite games, Scrabble — until now.

Merriam-Webster, publishing house to the eponymous dictionary, has released a new version of The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary with 5,000 new words, added to reflect new trends, styles and facts of the 21st century. In addition to those italicized above, words like “vlog,” “yuzu,” “soju,” “selfie,” “hashtag” and “beatbox” are now a part of the game, meaning you can use them legally in play and your opponents cannot “challenge” them off the board.

“ Language is constantly evolving and new words are added to Merriam-Webster dictionaries on an ongoing basis,” said Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski in a statement.

A representative from Hasbro, the Pawtucket, RI-based company that owns Scrabble, added that the new words include “favorites from the past decade.” And, for the first time, a word was voted in by Scrabble fans: geocache, whatever that means. (And, no, you do not need to know the definition of a word to play it in Scrabble, to the consternation of some less serious players — a.k.a., sore losers.)

As an avid Scrabble player myself, this development excites me (for those of you who care, I’m somewhere between a 1,400 and 1,600, depending on how I’m feeling). I always like having new words to play — especially words my opponent doesn’t know are legal “Scrabble words.” With words like “yuzu” and “ponzu,” there are also new, exciting opportunities to get big scores with powerful, tricky letters like the “z” (worth 10 points). Not that I’ll ever remember this word or be lucky enough to have the letters and situation to play it, but the official release suggests I impress my friends by “scoring 401 points for quinzhee!”

A favorite word of mine that wasn’t previously in the Scrabble dictionary, zen, also isn’t being included in this new iteration.

“Even though there is a generic sense of the word ‘zen’, all of the desk dictionaries that we consult when creating the Scrabble dictionary still recognize ‘Zen’ as a capitalized, proper noun, and therefore it was not added,” a Merriam-Webster spokesperson said. Capitalized pronouns aren’t allowed.

But, in the end, I don’t really care.

You see, when I play Scrabble, I don’t use The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary as my dictionary of choice — and hardly do any other serious Scrabble players. In the U.S. and Canada, players use what’s known as The Official Tournament and Club Word List. In the rest of the world, they use SOWPODS.

It wasn’t always this way.

The primary reason for the schism between Scrabble dictionaries is offensive words. Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, the excellent book on Scrabble and its serious players, tells the story of casual players offended by the inclusion of the word “jew” (a verb meaning “bargained in a miserly way”) and others, like “fart” and “fatso.” They engaged in a letter-writing campaign to have those and several dozen other words removed from the “official” Scrabble dictionary. This was done by Merriam-Webster without consulting the National Scrabble Association (now the North American Scrabble Players Association), an organization that puts on tournaments and more or less controls how serious Scrabble players relate to each other. In response, the association created and now maintains its own word list.

According to a Merriam-Webster spokesperson, there are just over 100,000 words in its version of the dictionary, including the 5,000 new words. The Official Tournament and Club Word List has 178,691 and SOWPODS has 267,751. You can look up words in the Merriam-Webster Scrabble dictionary here, or if you’re ready to really get serious about Scrabble, you can try the Word List dictionary here or SOWPODS dictionary here. It’s fun to compare which words are in each — at least for a Scrabble nerd like me.

While Merriam-Webster is getting all the press, this week The Official Tournament and Club Word List is also getting an update, according to John Chew, co-president of the Narth American Scrabble Players Association.

“The word list will see 9,000 words added to it,” he said, clarifying that the difference in number is because of “long-standing differences between the lists” and the addition of the “long list” of words longer than eight letters, which are not in the Merriam-Webster version.

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